Walkyr leaned to one side, craning his neck to see around the bend. The trees had been cut back on either bank to clear the tow road, but the hills farther back from the stream looked green and cool. He wondered what the local hunting was like? They hadn’t seen—
The thirty-pounder shell slammed into the foredeck beside him before he heard the sound of the shot. The impact transmitted to him through the barge’s planking was enough to stun anyone, and Styv Walkyr was still trying to figure out what in Langhorne’s name had happened when the shell’s two pounds of gunpowder exploded almost directly under him.
* * *
“That’s the way you do it!” Petty Officer Laisl Mhattsyn shouted, capering in glee as the lead barge spewed smoking fragments, like white-edged feathers, from the red-and-white-cored explosion. “That’s the way to hit the bastards!”
“A little less dancing and a little more shooting, Mhattsyn!” Lieutenant Yerek Sahbrahan snapped. The lieutenant was fifteen years younger than the petty officer, and he used his sword like a pointer, indicating the other barges on the river below the battery’s high, bluff-top perch. “They’re not going to sit there fat, dumb, and happy for long, so let’s get back on the guns, shall we?!”
“Aye, aye, Sir!” Mhattsyn agreed, still grinning. Then he glared at the rest of his gun crew. “Come on, you buggers! You heard the Lieutenant!”
The gunners swarmed over the piece, swabbing the barrel and reloading, and Sahbrahan nodded in satisfaction and stepped up to the parapet. Building the thick earthen berm had been a backbreaking task—almost as bad as dragging the guns themselves into position, although the tow road had helped a lot in that respect. He’d thought Brigadier Taisyn’s notion of camouflaging the entrenchments’ raw earth had been ridiculous, however … until he’d taken a hike upstream and realized the cut greenery made it extremely difficult to realize the guns were there until one came within two or three hundred yards. The bends in the river helped, of course, but the brigadier and Commander Watyrs had chosen their spot with care.
The guns commanded almost two thousand yards of the river, sweeping across it at an angle, although some of the men in the redoubts closer to river level and nearer to the bend had expressed doubts about having fused shells fired over their heads. Even Charisian fuses malfunctioned occasionally, but at least they weren’t firing shrapnel … yet, at any rate.
Mhattsyn’s thirty-pounder roared again. The fourteen-pounders in the river-level redoubts were firing as well, although they weren’t provided with explosive rounds, and he heard the dull thuds of the fifty-seven-pounder carronades … and the much louder explosions of their massive shells. Two of the barges, including Mhattsyn’s target, were already sinking. Three more were heavily on fire, and as he shaded his eyes with one hand, he saw men leaping frantically over the sides into the river. Some of them, obviously, swam almost as well as rocks.
The wind was out of the east, sweeping the smoke upriver, and he couldn’t hear the shrieks and screams—not from here. The Marines and Siddarmarkian infantry in the redoubts could undoubtedly hear them just fine, though, and young Sahbrahan’s mouth was a bleak, hard line as he thought about that. He’d never been a vengeful man, but he’d seen what Archbishop Zhasyn and his people had been through over this past winter. He’d seen the way the citizens of Glacierheart had cheered as their column came up the Siddarmark River from the capital. And he’d seen their desperation as reports of the juggernaut grinding down through Cliff Peak—and what was happening to the people behind it—came to them with each fresh waves of fugitives.
And Brigadier Taisyn had made sure they’d all heard what the “Army of God” had done to General Stahntyn’s men after the Battle of Sangyr.
He could live with a few screams from those bastards, he thought.
* * *
“Shan-wei take them!” Bishop Khalryn Waimyan snarled. “Where the hell were our scouts?! How the fuck did we walk into something like this!?”
His regimental commanders looked at one another. There were times Bishop Khalryn reverted to the Temple Guard officer he’d been and forgot the decorum expected out of a consecrated bishop of Mother Church. At moments like that, it was best not to draw attention to oneself.
“Well, Stywyrt?” Waimyan demanded, turning on Colonel Stywyrt Sahndhaim, the CO of Zion Division’s 1st Regiment, whose men had been in the lead barges.
“I don’t know, Sir,” Sahndhaim said flatly. He was normally a calm, courteously spoken officer, but today his voice was flat and hard. His reports were still preliminary, but the casualty totals he’d already heard were ugly. “The scouts were out, and I don’t see how anyone who wasn’t deaf and blind as well as stupid could’ve missed something like that!”
He jabbed an angry fist in the direction of the heretic entrenchments on either side of the river.
“Excuse me, My Lord,” Colonel Tymythy Dowain, Waimyan’s executive officer, said. Waimyan turned a choleric eye upon him, goaded by the clerical address. It was technically correct, but he knew Dowain had used it at least partly to calm him down.
“What?” he said shortly.
“My Lord,” Dowain said, “Colonel Mardhar was responsible for the scouting today. As you know, the Hundred and Ninety-First has done an excellent job in that regard ever since we entered Westmarch. One of the first things I did was to ask him what had gone wrong, and he couldn’t answer me. But, My Lord, at least three of his scouting sections haven’t reported in.” The colonel shrugged. “I think we know now why they haven’t.”
“Why the hell didn’t anyone miss them?” Sahndhaim demanded harshly.
“Because they weren’t due to report back in yet, Stywyrt.” Dowain spoke patiently, clearly aware of what was goading his fellow colonel’s temper. “They’re supposed to send back word if they spot anything; otherwise the assumption is that if they haven’t sent back word, they haven’t spotted anything. Mardhar’s as angry and as upset as you could wish—some of those men have been with him from the very beginning, and he doesn’t pick his advanced scouts because they’re incompetent. He asked me to tell you he feels terrible about what’s happened.”
Sahndhaim’s mouth twisted, but he made himself inhale deeply and nodded. There was no point venting his fury on someone who’d clearly been doing his job … and wasn’t even present, anyway.
“All right,” Waimyan said, after a moment, following Sahndhaim’s example and forcing himself to step back from his own temper, “the Bishop Militant’s going to want to know what we’re up against. What do I tell him?”
“I’m working on that, Sir,” Dowain said, reverting to the military address he knew Waimyan preferred. “So far, it looks like they have redoubts on both sides of the river.” He laid a rough sketch on the table. “As you can see, they’re about ten miles east of where the high road crosses the river. The Daivyn gets a little narrower and deeper at that point, and it bends around these hills, here.” He tapped the sketch. “It looks like the bulk of their guns are here, on the north bank. That lets them fire up past the bend, and from the weight and accuracy of the fire, they have to be heavier than anything we’ve got.” He looked up to meet his general’s gaze. “If I had to guess, they’re naval guns.”
Waimyan’s jaw muscles clamped, but he nodded. It made sense. Siddarmark didn’t have any mobile artillery—Vicar Zhaspahr and Vicar Allayn had made certain of that, thank Langhorne!—and there probably hadn’t been time for any Charisian field guns to reach the Republic. Or to get this far forward, at any rate. One of the reasons for how rapidly they were advancing was to beat the Imperial Charisian Army into Glacierheart. But the bastards certainly did have artillery aboard their galleons, and after what had happened to Bishop Kornylys’ fleet, they could afford to spare some of it. But that meant—
“So we’re looking at thirty-pounders?” one of his other regimental commanders demanded, and Dowain shrugged.
“Probably. In fact, I think they may have some fifty-seven-pounders in the
ir forward redoubts.” He showed his teeth in a thin smile. “They’d only be carronades, but with the bend in the river leading up to them, they don’t need a lot of range.”
“Shit,” someone muttered, and Waimyan smiled even more thinly than his executive officer had.
“Whoever decided where to put these people knew what he was about,” the bishop said. “He’s doing exactly what he needs to do: slow us down until they can get someone up to help him try to stop us.” He glowered at the map. “The bastard’s got the river locked up tighter than a drum—we’re going to have to raise the barges he’s already sunk just to clear the channel—and we’re damned well not going to be able to march right down the river and punch him out of our way. And I’ll bet you that whoever it was kept an eye on his flanks, as well. We need to find out just how well entrenched they are. I don’t want any lives thrown away in the process, but until we know that, we can’t know anything else about how to deal with them. And we will deal with them, Gentlemen.” His eyes were hard. “Trust me on that one.”
* * *
“Well, we damned well bloodied their noses,” Colonel Hauwerd Zhansyn observed with bitter, heartfelt satisfaction. “The bodies’re still floating downriver.” He smiled fiercely at Commander Watyrs. “Makes at least a nice little down payment for General Stahntyn. Tell your gunners my boys appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome,” Hainz Watyrs said. If a naval officer was out of place seventeen hundred miles from the nearest salt water, the Old Charisian seemed unaware of it. “It helped that they walked right into it, though.” He shook his head. “I really didn’t think we’d be able to get away with that, Brigadier.”
“Never know until you try,” Mahrtyn Taisyn said, and shrugged. “Major Tyrnyr’s suggestion that we issue arbalests to the security forces probably helped a lot. At least there weren’t any shots for anyone on the other side to hear. Not until your guns opened up, at any rate, Hainz.”
Watyrs nodded, and the three of them looked down at the river. They stood outside the log-and-earth-roofed dugout which had been built as Taisyn’s headquarters, and normally there wouldn’t have been a lot to see. The moon was only a pale sliver, and even that wan illumination was half obscured by high, thin cloud, but there were still a few smears of fire out on the river where some of the beached barges had smoldered for hours. And the lookouts had orders to ignite the massive bonfires laid ready to illuminate the water if the Temple Loyalists should be feeling adventurous enough to try forcing the river under cover of darkness.
Wish they would, the Marine brigadier told himself grimly, thinking about the barricade they’d laid across the main barge channel.
It would take work parties at least two or three days to clear the river of the logs, sunken river barges full of rock, and other obstacles his men had emplaced, and Watyrs had arranged nine of his fifty-seven-pounder carronades to cover the barricade. If the bastards would be kind enough to send men down to clear it, he’d be delighted to use them for target practice. Nobody was coming down that river alive as long as Taisyn’s batteries and redoubts commanded its channel.
“What do you think they’re going to do next, Sir?” Zhahnsyn asked.
The colonel commanded the two thousand Siddarmarkians who provided half of Taisyn’s infantry. Taisyn’s remaining five hundred Marines and Zhahnsyn’s other three thousand pikemen and arbalesters had taken over security from young Byrk Raimahn’s volunteers on the Green Cove Trace and the Hanymar Gap. Especially the Gap. If Cahnyr Kaitswyrth decided to send a flanking column overland.…
He’d hated detaching that much of his manpower, but Raimahn’s people were ready to drop. Even if he’d been willing to ask it of them, they were simply too exhausted to stop a fresh, determined push. Taisyn only hoped his professional soldiers could do half as well as those “civilian volunteers” had in holding their ground until Duke Eastshare could reach Glacierheart.
In the meantime, it was his job to slow Bishop Militant Cahnyr down, and he’d tried not to think about the enormous risk he was running. Unfortunately, Zhahnsyn’s question didn’t give him a lot of choice but to think about it.
“Everything we’ve seen or heard indicates that unlike their Navy, their Army can find its arse, as long as it gets to use both hands,” he said, eyes still fixed on the guttering flames. “According to the reports, they did for General Stahntyn’s regiments in jig time, too. I think we have to assume they aren’t going to do anything stupid … unfortunately. What I’d really like them to do is to try to assault straight down the river, but they aren’t dumb enough to do that. So I expect the first thing they’ll do is probe to see exactly where we are and try to get a feel for how strong we are. After that?”
He shrugged.
“I wish we had some cavalry to operate against their rear, Sir,” Zhahnsyn said. “Something to keep them looking over their shoulders instead of concentrating on what’s—or who’s—in front of them!”
“It’d be nice,” Taisyn agreed. “Unfortunately, neither Marines nor Siddarmarkian pikemen make very good cavalry … and you don’t even want to think about what one of Hainz’ sailors would look like in a saddle!”
“What worries me, Sir—aside from the fact that we’re outnumbered about thirty-five to one or so—is that they do have cavalry. A lot of it,” Commander Watyrs pointed out. “We’ve got a strong position here, but outside the entrenchments, we’re not very mobile. As long as we’ve got the river in our rear, the obstacles in the channel mean we can pull out faster in boats than they can march downstream or even send cavalry after us. But if they manage to cut the river between here and Ice Lake.…”
It was his turn to shrug, and Taisyn nodded.
“That’s the biggest danger,” he agreed. “And their guns don’t have to be anywhere near as good as ours if they get them to the riverbank. But like you say, it’s a strong position, and Hauwerd and I made sure we could defend from the rear or the flank, as well as frontally. If they do get around behind us, then we stay right here where we are, stuck in their throat like a frigging fishbone.” He bared his teeth in the darkness. “Trust me, if the Duke gets to Ice Lake while we’re still here, he’ll have a damned good chance of clearing the river behind us long enough to pull us out. As long as we can keep their barges and their heavy stuff west of here, at least.”
The other two nodded, their faces as grim as his own, for all of them understood the unspoken corollary. If Eastshare didn’t get here in time, and the Army of God, with its hundred thousand-plus regulars and the forty or fifty thousand Temple Loyalist militia it had added to itself, got around behind their positions, it didn’t matter how deeply and well dug in their four thousand men were. Not in the end.
But if we don’t stop them here, we lose all of western Glacierheart—probably the whole damned province, Taisyn thought. And we can’t possibly fight them in an open field battle, not when they’ve got that big a numerical advantage and even a half-ass idea of what to do with it. Give me a full army brigade, and I’d take my chances, even without cavalry, but with only two thousand Marines and sailors and Zhansyn’s pikemen? In the open? We’d hurt them—maybe—but we’d never have a prayer of stopping them … and we’d all be just as dead at the end of it.
He stood between his artillery commander and the Siddarmarkian colonel, watching the beached barges burn and prayed for the duke to hurry.
.III.
Serabor,The Sylmahn Gap, Old Province, Republic of Siddarmark
The distant rumble wasn’t thunder, and the flashes reflecting from the low-lying cloud to the north weren’t lightning, either. General Kynt Clareyk, Baron Green Valley and commanding officer, 2nd Brigade (reinforced), Charisian Expeditionary Force, knew exactly what both of them actually were as he watched the flickering illumination while the lead barge of his brigade glided towards the improvised landing below the dam at Serabor.
He didn’t know how Trumyn Stohnar’s men had managed to stop Bahrnabai Wyrshym’s army. Over half of
them were dead. Colonel Wyllys was still on his feet, somehow, but he was one of only two of Stohnar’s original regimental commanders who hadn’t been killed or wounded, and his regiment hadn’t been as fortunate as him. Of the twenty-two hundred men he’d led to the Sylmahn Gap last winter, two hundred and sixty-five were still alive, and ninety of them were wounded. Of his company commanders only young Hainree Klairynce had survived, commanding the single quarter-strength company which was all that remained of the 37th.
Yet that company was still up there, where those guns were flashing, hunkered down as part of the tattered reserve General Stohnar had managed to constitute out of the broken bits and pieces of his regulars and the more brutally winnowed militia. Wyllys commanded that reserve—all eight hundred men of it—while Colonel Fhranklyn Pruait of the 76th held the entrenchments.
Well, him and Commander Tyrwait, Green Valley amended, and shook his head. He hadn’t really thought he was going to get here in time. And he wouldn’t have, if not for Lieutenant Commander Shain Tyrwait and his naval artillerists.
He looked down through one of Owl’s SNARCs as the big barge squeaked against the fenders. The stabbing flashes of rifles and the bigger, fiercer eruptions of cannon and the shrapnel shells streaking in both directions showed clearly to the SNARC’s sensors, despite the overcast. A lot more shells were being fired south than north, he thought grimly, and reliable fuses or not, the solid wall of guns Nybar, Vynair, and Bahrkly had assembled almost hub-to-hub were steadily killing Stohnar’s men and ripping his earthworks apart. But they weren’t having it all their own way, either, and Green Valley’s eyes glittered with approval as one of Tyrwait’s thirty-pounder shells found an Army of God ammunition wagon. The spectacular explosion killed half the crews of a Temple Loyalist twelve-pounder section … and fresh gunners advanced grimly to the pieces, stepping over the dead and writhing bodies of their predecessors.